via Instagram

Sounds like (see what I did there?) Neil Young’s Pono Player is bullshit:

My test compared Pono files against Apple’s iTunes files, which come in 16-bit/256Kbps AAC format (more on formats below). That’s much better than the radically compressed MP3 files of 1998.

There’s another factor at play here, too: Pono is going to extraordinary lengths to acquire remastered versions of the songs in its catalog. “If we are looking for a popular master and find it has not been sampled at the highest rate, we try to access it and, with the cooperation of labels and artists, maximize the recapture at the highest resolution,” Neil Young wrote to me. “We reach out to the creators, if they are still with us, to include their knowledge in the mastering. Sometimes they will even supervise it. This is a long process, but we are providing the absolute best available and pushing for improvement in resolution for maximizing the labels/creators’ art whenever possible.”

Clearly, if Pono’s testing involved a remastered, high-resolution audio file going head-to-head with an original, crummy MP3 of the same song, you’d hear a difference.

The thing is, that’s not a fair test. The music we buy today from iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and similar online stores has much higher quality than low-res MP3 files. Why would you spend $400 on a new player and re-buy all of your music files if the result sounds no better than what’s on your phone already?

Fuck you, Neil.

via Daring Fireball

Bryan fires a missile on the vaccine bullshit sweeping our dumb country:

Not too long ago, measles was declared eradicated in the United States. It was a public health victory of huge import. And now, that victory is threatened.

It all began less than twenty years ago with the publication of a now discredited study linking vaccinations with autism. The facts are clear. There is no link between vaccinations and autism. But, as has been said countless times before, yet continues to be forgotten, facts do not matter when they conflict with belief.

A small number of people believe, deep down, in places inaccessible to evidence, that some vaccines cause autism. Therefore, these people have chosen not to immunize their children against one of the most virulent diseases mankind has ever seen, weakening herd immunity and leading to the outbreak now taking place in the southwestern United States.

We’re all just monkeys with smartphones.

That’s it.

From the NYTimes: Robin Williams’s Widow and Children Tangle Over Estate:

Nearly six months after the death of Robin Williams, the Academy Award-winning actor and comedian, his widow and his children have become engaged in a contentious legal dispute over his estate.

Court documents filed in December and January outline a bitter disagreement over money and property between the widow, Susan Schneider Williams, who was Mr. Williams’s third wife, and Zak, Zelda and Cody Williams, the comedian’s children from two previous marriages that ended in divorce.

At stake is not only a portion of the wealth that Mr. Williams accumulated in a film, television and stage career of some 40 years, but also cherished belongings that include his clothing, collectibles and personal photographs.

In their court papers, both sides display keen interest in such memorabilia — everything from Mr. Williams’s bicycles to his collections of fossils and toys — as tangible, deeply personal reminders of the irrepressible, manic imagination that drove his performances as a comedian and actor.

We humans love stuff!

We can’t get enough of it!

—Derek Sivers

via Fubiz

—Andy Warhol

The case against extending unemployment benefits essentially boils down to two arguments. First, the economy has improved, so the unemployed should no longer need extra time to find a new job. Second, extended benefits could lead job seekers either to not search as hard or to become choosier about the kind of job they will accept, ultimately delaying their return to the workforce.2

But the evidence doesn’t support either of those arguments. The economy has indeed improved, but not for the long-term unemployed, whose odds of finding a job are barely higher today than when the recession ended nearly five years ago. And the end of extended benefits hasn’t spurred the unemployed back to work; if anything, it has pushed them out of the labor force altogether.
—Cutting Off Emergency Unemployment Benefits Hasn’t Pushed People Back to Work, FiveThirtyEight

From Sports Illustrated:

A photographer is suing Nike in federal court, alleging that the sneaker company used his work to make its famous “Jumpman” logo of Michael Jordan’s silhouette.

Image taken from Brand New
It looks like the logo was derived from those photos to me.
Flashback: When I started this blog almost nine years ago, my third post compared the Air Jordan “Jumpman” logo with the Shaq “Dunkman” logo.

This week Michael and Bryan are joined by special guest RJ Dugan. They discuss the graphic design profession, the value of great copywriters, lazy templated design pattern trends, using the Bootstrap framework, Flash banner ads, low-fi rock n roll, punk rock, f!#king disco, how unaffordable cities are, the Philly-to-NYC commute, digital dashboards in cars and pixellated Affleck c#$k.
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